Category Archives: Social Commentary

Education, Media Criticism, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Good Old Days Of Journalism

11 Comments

I think that if we’re going to have schools of journalism, this should be a required exercise:

Mariam, our managing editor, was previously our rock-star art director. So she resumed that role for ALL ON PAPER. Her designers mostly deserted her after they learned a terrifying reality of pre-computer layout…

You must do math.

First, there’s headline counting: A capital M is two, but a lower-case L (or is that the number 1?) is one-half. So how many counts do I have for a 48-point head across two columns?

Then there are the stories whose column inches must be distributed evenly across the page, requiring long division (without a calculator) and resulting in vaguely sexual newsroom directives like, “I need 11 inches to fill this box, and I need it now.”

Finally, there’s sizing photos with that confounded proportion wheel. Even though it’s supposed to help you shrink or enlarge a photo, and even though the instructions are printed right on the front, that God-awful wheel still doesn’t ever seem to give you the proper percentages. It’s more like a Magic 8-Ball than a round slide rule: much more mysterious than accurate.

“It’s been rough,” Mariam admits. “I’ve found myself sitting in silence, reminiscing about the days when CNTRL+Z was all it took. I miss my iMac.” But she also confesses…

Regardless of the stress or the obscene amount of paper that’s accumulated on the newsroom floor, I won’t forget what this project has given us. We’ve formed this sort of newsroom camaraderie that I hadn’t experienced before, and it means everything.

I’ve never been a professional journalist, but this is the process that we went through preparing proposals at Rockwell in the eighties. It took a long time to get the publications department to go to computers, even after the engineers were writing their proposal inputs in Wordperfect, and some had Macs with Pagemaker. We would have to print out our word processing output, and they would dutifully rekey it into their typesetting machines, because there were no compatible disk formats, which meant, of course, that we got to reedit for typos. They would cut out and wax the columns and lay them out on the boards, and then copy the gallies for us to review.

It meant that you had to have everything done about three days before it was due, because last-minute changes were just too painful to incorporate. On a thirty-day proposal, that was a lot of lost time.

There was an ugly transition period in the early nineties (a year or three before I left the company) when those responsible for actually writing the proposals rebelled and insisted on doing it themselves on Pagemaker. Pubs resisted, of course, reading the handwriting on the wall, and washing their hands of the results, though a few saw the future and came over to help (and learn what they would be doing themselves in a few years if they still had a job). Upper management had to adjudicate the situation, but the transition must have happened, because when I went back to do consulting at Boeing a decade or so later, everyone was publishing in Word, with an editor assigned to the team. But I think that it’s important for journalists using modern tools to understand the roots of their profession. If you could give them a hot-lead type machine, it would be even more educational, though probably going full Gutenberg with carved wooden blocks should be reserved for grad school. Hell, it might even teach them the difference between “font” and “typeface.”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Big-Government Morality

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Thoughts from Timothy Dalrymple:

One of the great difficulties of this issue, for Christians, is that the morality of spending and debt has been so thoroughly demagogued that it’s impossible to advocate cuts in government spending without being accused of hatred for the poor and needy. A group calling itself the “Circle of Protection” recently promoted a statement on “Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor.” But we don’t need to protect the programs. We need to protect the poor. Indeed, sometimes we need to protect the poor from the programs. Too many anti-poverty programs are beneficial for the politicians that pass them, and veritable boondoggles for the government bureaucracy that administers them, but they actually serve to rob the poor of their dignity and their initiative, they undermine the family structures that help the poor build prosperous lives, and ultimately mire the poor in poverty for generations. Does anyone actually believe that the welfare state has served the poor well?

It is immoral to ignore the needs of the least of these. But it’s also immoral to ’serve’ the poor in ways that only make more people poor, and trap them in poverty longer. And it’s immoral to amass a mountain of debt that we will pass on to later generations. I even believe it’s immoral to feed the government’s spending addiction. Since our political elites have demonstrated such remarkably poor stewardship over our common resources, it would be foolish and wrong to give them more resources to waste. What we need our political leaders committed to prudence and thrift, to wise and far-sighted stewardship, and to spurring a free and thriving economy that will encourage the poor and all Americans to seize their human dignity as creatures made in the image of God, to be fruitful and take initiative and express their talents and creativity.

Fat chance of that. Not enough opportunities for graft.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Real Monopoly

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Support the campaign:

Why, when the game was first released in the 1930s, did people all over the world make an almost cooperative decision to drop the auction? (A decision that is especially puzzling given that it makes for a worse game).

Well I puzzled over this for a long time until my friend Becky – who along with her husband Darrell is something of a board games geek – supplied what I’m pretty sure is the answer. We, gamers as we are, might think a game featuring lots of inter-player shafting is superior to one without. But Monopoly is, and always was, played not by gamers, but by families; and inter-player shafting is liable to cause all sorts of upset.

This is actually frustrating, because (if I remember my history correctly) the game was originally intended to help teach about capitalism and free markets. By crippling the game in this way, it makes it much more about luck, which feeds into the notion that winners must “help out” the losers, because they have no control over their fates, thus feeding into the socialist impulse. That is, to use Dick Gephardt’s unfortunate phrase of a few years back about “life’s lottery,” it encourages fatalism and wealth redistribution, instead of initiative.

In any event, even if the real thing isn’t great for family and friends, gamers at least should play it seriously.

[Via Geek Press]

Philosophy, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

More Ettinger Thoughts

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I’ll have my own obituary up at Pajamas Media tomorrow, but he’s an interesting example of a man who lived (and perhaps continues to live) by his own beliefs, never relinquishing them even as he approached deanimation.

Many more men are interested in cryonics than women (though there are many of the latter as well), and generally the explanation for this is that women tend to be less individualistic, and define themselves in terms of their relationships, particularly family. I recall, almost forty years ago, when a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and his mother said, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to live forever, or wake up in a future in which I didn’t know anyone.” That has never bothered me, and I have never had trouble meeting new people and establishing new relationships. I’d rather do that than give up my individuality and memories. But Ettinger got around it partially by persuading his loved ones to get aboard the ambulance with him (though as he noted himself, it will be interesting times if he gets revived with both wives).

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Time To Raise Taxes

26 Comments

…on the poor:

Distressingly, neither the president nor the Democrats offer any rigorous account of the optimal level of tax progressivity. Rather, the president seems to think that no matter how high the current marginal tax rates, the correct social policy is to move them upward. As such, he cannot explain why the top marginal tax rate for the rich should not approach 100 percent as they accumulate more and more wealth. After all, why not push the limits if efforts to redistribute wealth do not at some point impede its creation?

My view is the polar opposite of Obama’s. I believe, now more than ever, that the optimal level of progressivity in the system is zero, so that today’s marginal adjustments in taxes should increase taxes on those on the bottom half of the income distribution. To explain why, let us start with the premise that the defenders of any progressive tax have to give some principled account of the optimal degree of tax progressivity. They have to identify which of the infinite number of progressive tax schedules they embrace, and then explain why it is best.

They can’t. It’s all about “fairness,” not rationality or revenue. Or preventing the country from going into a tipping point of entitlement.

[Update a while later]

Are we having a Gettysburg moment in the long cold civil war?

If so, I hope that the Republicans continue to press their advantage, as Meade didn’t.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Father Of Transhumanism

2 Comments

…has deanimated:

In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.

Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”

I’ve never understood the resistance, either.

Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.

[Update early afternoon]

Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.

[Another update a few minutes later]

This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.